Illinois farmers lost a lot from milk checks during pandemic

A dairy economist from Illinois says his state’s milk producers had heavy financial losses during the COVID pandemic.

Dr. Mike Hutjens tells Brownfield Illinois, unlike their cheese-making neighbors to the north in Wisconsin, has fewer and smaller farms, with most of their production not used for cheese. “We’re a very high milk market because one of our major co-ops provides almost all of the fluid milk to school programs and a lot of the grocery stores as well, so certainly, we’re fairly high into fluid so then the price differential really hammered us a year, year and a half ago.”

And Hutjens says the Illinois herd is down two and a half percent to about 79-thousand cows.

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